


Drink Me or I'll Drown in a Sea of Giants

by goldenmeme



Category: White Collar
Genre: Gen, I fell in love with the flim-flammer, charming con-artist, hidden ace, pretty grifter, quick fingers, sexy counterfitter, switch-blading
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-16
Updated: 2013-01-16
Packaged: 2017-11-25 17:38:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/641357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldenmeme/pseuds/goldenmeme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the explosion, Kate starts visiting him again. Once a week, on Tuesdays, just like before. (Placed at the end of season 1.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Drink Me or I'll Drown in a Sea of Giants

After the explosion, Kate starts visiting him again. Once a week, on Tuesdays, just like before.

The first time it’s the middle of the day and she’s there across the yard, in ballet flats and a red and white summer dress that he’s never seen before. When he spots her she waves—hands wrapped in lacy white arm warmers; Kate never liked having her hands bare—and he shoots toward her instantly, not even thinking about the game of Spades was about to win, running wildly, tracking the beacon of white among all the orange.

She’s gone when he reaches her. It’s like chasing the end of a rainbow: from across the yard she looked like she was standing just beyond the benches; from the benches she’s beyond the fence, standing in the untended sprawl of dirt and looking so, so sad.

He calls her name once. She looks away. She’s gone. 

.

 

The second time it’s Monday night and Bobby is making his rounds. This is something that hasn’t changed either: all of the little rituals that Neal found right where he left them, as if he hasn’t been gone any time at all.

“Neal, you gotta turn that off.”

“One more minute, Bobby?”

“Okay, one more.”

“Is it midnight yet?”

“Yeah, it’s midnight.”

Neal looks at the marks on the wall. There are still few enough that he can count them individually: eleven, now twelve. He doesn’t know when they’re supposed to end this time; if he has enough wall, if he has too much.

Peter is going to collect him again some day.

He turns off his light and there she is, a dark silhouette beyond the bars.

“Kate,” he whispers.

She moves, and the optical illusion of black-Kate on black-bars breaks. She’s in the cell with him, tilting her head and tugging her ear, a fake tell she once invented for an alias that eventually curdled into a real one.

“Hi, Neal,” she says.

“Kate, what happened?” he whispers. He has to keep his voice down or Bobby will be back around. “The plane—who—“

“I don’t know,” she says. She doesn’t modulate her voice at all; nobody will hear her, and maybe death makes people less sympathetic to conversational queues. It makes her sound harsh. “Was it the plane? I don’t even remember getting to the hanger.”

“Yeah,” he says, and reaches up to caress the air around her face, quixotic, can’t touch, but she bears it patiently. “It was the plane, baby, the plane exploded.”

“You weren’t with me?”

“I—“ he fumbles for the words, wades through the guilt. “I was on my way. I saw it happen. What—there was a bomb. It had to have been a bomb. Who would do that?”

“Can we talk about something else?” she asks.

He pauses for a moment, battling the desire to please her against frustration.

“I’m… trying to avenge your death here, Kate.”

She shrugs, rolls her eyes, awkward. “Maybe I don’t want my death avenged. Maybe I just want a couple more minutes with you without having to worry about bombs and loot and double-crosses. Maybe… maybe it was all my fault.”

“Don’t say that, of course it wasn’t—“

She’s gone.

.

 

The third week, he falls asleep waiting for her and wakes to the sound of riffle shuffling.

“Was it Fowler?” he asks, still more than half asleep, face smashed into the wrong end of the bed.

“Yes,” she says. “No. I don’t know. Pick a card.”

A deck fans out in front of his face, and he lifts himself up just far enough to pull a card out.

Queen of Hearts.

“This is why I love you,” he says. “You got style, Kiddo.”

“Mm,” she says and plucks the card out of his fingers, puts it back on top of the deck, shuffles perfunctorily, and hands him back the Ace of Spades.

“I’ve taught you nothing,” he says mournfully.

“Loss of a loved one,” she says, and then presses the King of Clubs on top of the spade in his hand. “A man that you can trust above all others.”

He stares up at her. Her eyes are unnaturally blue in the darkness. She used to read people’s fortunes at festivals when the two of them were really broke. She’d wear huge sun hats and flip-flops, and sun-dark women with blonde dreads would look at her like she was a god while she spun pretty lies about the lines in their palms. An old woman once tipped her a hundred dollar bill. A young woman once had no money, but said that she’d had a dream about Kate reading her cards the night before, and she offered barter; she sang Nuit d’Etoiles to them while they ate grapes there on the grass.

Kate presses the Nine of Diamonds into his hand. “Adventure.” The Six of Spades. “Failed plans.” Ten of Clubs. “Happiness.”

She looks at him expectantly.

He says, “None of those is my card.”

She says, “Neal, this entire deck is yours.”

The deck falls through her hands, shatters when it hits the ground, coating the cell floor in diamonds and spades.

She’s gone.

.

 

(The next morning he’s dead on his feet at breakfast, mechanically following the line, and when he flicks open his napkin up the Queen of Hearts flutters out. He laughs, holds the card up to whomever can see, says, “It’s my card,” with all the delight of a child witnessing his first magic trick.)

.

 

The next Tuesday it’s Peter who visits, but Neal is escorted into the room and there’s Kate leaning against the wall behind Peter. Peter is wearing that horrible suit he always wears when he catches Neal. Kate is wearing that sweater-dress, the short-short-short cashmere one, and she is not wearing a bra under it.

Neal’s brain blows two different fuses at once.

When he regains the ability to speak he says, quite sincerely, “You have really bad timing.”

Peter says, “What, am I interrupting your stories?”

Kate says, “I have excellent timing.”

This is—just awful. He’s starving for both of their company, but having both of them at once is a complete waste when it means he can’t talk frankly to Peter and can’t talk to Kate at all. There is no angle to work here.

So he sits and says to Peter, “What have you found out about the plane?”

“People in orange jumpsuits don’t get leads,” Peter says, scolding and patient, like he’s telling Neal he can’t have dessert until he’s finished his vegetables. He holds up a file folder and says, “Wanna make a deal?”

“Peter,” Neal says, and sighs.

Peter’s been here five times in four weeks, bringing news of his latest cases and presents from Elizabeth and the paperwork that just needs Neal’s signature to bust him out of here. He doesn’t understand why Neal won’t sign it.

Neal will sign it. Of course he will. Eventually.

The Comanche Indians used to cut off the first digit of their little finger when they lost a loved one. Neal doesn’t think wanting a vacation is really all that radical.

Peter says, “What angle are you playing here? If you’re holding out hoping to get some time knocked off your sentence—“

“He’s so big from over here,” Kate says, drawing Neal’s attention. She circles the table until she’s at Neal’s back, watching Peter the entire time. “Like, really… big. Kind of like he’s more real than anything else in the room, you know?”

He does. Peter is the single most substantial thing Neal has ever known. Neal’s world has always been paper moons and paste jewels, genuine magic that everyone knows is bullshit and slight of hand that even the skeptics believe. Peter is the only undeniable thing in a world of lies.

Kate says, “You should take what he has to offer. Sounds like a good deal to me.”

“Am I boring you?” Peter asks.

“No,” Neal says. That’s hardly good enough, so Neal rubs his eyes and says, “Sorry, haven’t been sleeping well. The sheets here have a thread count of about five. Don’t even get me started on the turn-down service.”

“Your life is full of hardship,” Peter says. “Is Mozzie trying to get you a re-trial, Neal?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Peter.”

It’s a blatant non-answer. Peter will take it as a yes, because Peter is keen enough that occasionally Neal can use it against him. In truth Mozzie isn’t doing anything for Neal right now except probably drinking his wine, but while Neal won’t lie to Peter he also doesn’t like telling the truth. There’s no reason Peter has to know that Neal has made Peter his only option.

“Sly boots,” Kate says. She circles the table again to hover around Peter, curved toward him intently like he’s a sculpture she’s snuck beyond the rope to see, front and back, then nose to nose, then tracing the minutia of his jaw with her eyes. Neal wants to reach across the table and swat her away. If Peter is matter then Kate is anti-matter, and Neal is terrified that if they get too close they’ll both be annihilated.

Kate says, “That bomb. Are you sure it wasn’t him?”

“Yes,” Neal says.

Peter looks momentarily surprised. It swiftly gives way to satisfaction and he says, “Well all right,” and slides the folder across the table, taps the very centre of it with two decisive fingers.

Peter has been talking. Trying to convince Neal to come back to work. Neal just said yes.

He looks over to glare at Kate, but she’s gone.

.

 

The government is not what one would call alacritous, and by next Tuesday Neal is still in prison. Not long, just two more days, but he’s here now, curled on his cot facing the wall when he feels the chill of her radiate against his back.

“This is the third time I got out of prison because of you,” he says.

“I’m always the reason you’re here in the first place. So.”

He turns over. She’s hovering above him in the darkness, a dark smudge of hair, the shadow of a nose. She hardly looks like a person. Now she’s a brief figure study, just a sparse swoop of lines and a lot of negative space. The ink isn’t dry in her eyes.

He says, “You won’t visit me on the outside.”

“Aw,” she murmurs, that aching, sympathetic sound that only girls can make, and tucks at the hair behind his ear. It’s staticy and hot/cold where she touches him, like a limb waking up from frostbite, and he twitches and tries not to shy away.

“Tell me who did this,” he says.

“You did,” she says. “I did. Peter. Garrett. Garrett’s boss. Everybody had a part in it, Neal, nobody did it, it just happened. Hey. Oh, hey, I’m supposed to be the sad one here, Mister.”

He laughs shakily. “I think I’m due,” he says, looks up and blinks and blinks and then just gives in and thumbs at the corners of his eyes. “I mean, Jesus, we didn’t even get a day.”

“We got a lot of days,” she says.

He glowers. Don’t kid a kidder.

“Good days,” she insists. “We had an epic love story spanned six years and four continents, Neal. They’ll make movies about it. They’ll write songs. Little girls will tell their mothers that they want to grow up to be conwomen and little boys will steal grape juice and test answers to try to win their hearts. Those kids will grow up to be world famous art thieves, and Peter’s grandchildren will grow up to dedicate their lives to catching them, and it’ll be because of all those great years we had together.”

Neal stares up at her. He can hardly even see her. He wants to write sonnets for her. He wants to go on quests in her honour, the kind that can only be written about in tomes with inch-thick leather binding. He already has. It wasn’t enough.

She murmurs, “My only regret is that I actually had a bottle of our Boudreaux in my bag that day.”

His breath hiccups, maybe a laugh, and it actually feels like something has ripped in his chest.

Desperately, he says, “I love you."

She says, “I loved our time together so, so much.”

Kate hates lying to people, except when she loves it. It’s a trait they share. Kate only lies when she isn’t personally invested, so this is absolutely the most she can give him: misdirection.

She doesn’t love him, but she does care for him, and he thought he could work with that at some point, but now the game is over. He won’t be getting any more chances to turn this in his favour, to be her knight in shining armour, to give her everything she could ever want and finally steal her heart. This is it. There are no more angles left.

“Say it,” he says. “Say it anyway.”

She frowns, just a hint of a shadow between the slashes of her eyebrows.

“Kate, _please_ ,” he says.

“Neal,” she whispers, sympathetic, and leans in close, her inky fall of hair blacking out his world. She’s going to kiss him, he realizes, and god that’s going to hurt, but he can’t refuse it so he just tries to brace himself.

He doesn’t realize he’s closed his eyes until the kiss doesn’t come and he has to open them.

She’s gone.


End file.
